<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Thank you,
Cengiz for sharing your op-ed on lean production with Anna Watkins Fisher. I'm particularly struck by this line: "This
crisis is making visible the fragile social relations that have until now
invisibly underwritten the new American way of life." I have been thinking
about how the invisibility to the eye of the virus, and the uncertainty of its
mechanism since it is novel, has the effect of rendering hyper-visible, or magnifying,
existing structural contradictions that have held together capitalist regimes.
As Sorelle writes of the "vast inequalities between people that have come
to light"— it is perhaps not so much that these inequalities were hidden
in the first place but it is harder now to avert our collective eyes from these
inequalities. In the Singapore example Sorelle gave, the predatory treatment and
othering of the mostly South Asian laborers in the construction and shipping industries
have been both omnipresent, criticized for decades, and larger ignored but now
that the status quo is threatening the health and economic wellbeing of its
internal others, and the optics of Singapore's attempt to be a model example of
handling the virus, temporary measures have been put in place, such as shifting
workers out of perennially overcrowded dorms, etc. It remains to be seen, after
the end of this long pandemic moment, what of the temporary and emergency
measures that are being enacted within different states will remain permanent,
at whose benefit. In Jonathan's formulation, "what makes us vulnerable to
the worst is also what grants us the possibility of the best." If this global
viral situation reveals us as intertwined lives that cannot be enclosed by borders,
I wonder what renewed, hopeful logics can emerge in this crisis and its
aftermath. </span></p></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"></div></div>